The present invention relates to resource recycling and product circulation systems which allow products to be produced while useful resources are reused, and more particularly, to a system and method for automating disassembly operations for automatically extracting useful resources in a resource reclamation process, and a product circulation system and method for automating product specification decision operations in order to replace a previous product by a new product as well as establishing an accounting route for charging expenses required for the replacement of the previous product.
Problems in waste disposal and environmental pollution are presently so grave that environment protection is regarded as one of the most important social problems today. Associated with the environmental protection, resources are severely required to be reused.
On the other hand, a variety of techniques have been developed for the purpose of automatically producing products. For example, industrial robots for automated manufacturing, CAD (Computer Aided Designing) systems for automated designing have already been put to practical use. Also, techniques have been developed for integrating a variety of processes relating to the production on a computer system.
However, these conventional production systems are not developed in consideration of reverse processes, i.e., recycling processes for disassembling out-of-use products to reclaim reusable resources from the products. For this reason, an immense cost is required for reclaiming useful resources from such out-of-use products.
Further, the conventional production systems are not developed in consideration of replacement processes, i.e., reproduction processes for supplementing, as required, currently circulated products equivalent to those of a previous model. This also causes an immense cost to be required for replacing previous products.